Cladding pumped (also called double-clad) fiber lasers and amplifiers are good converters of low brightness radiation from laser diodes to a high brightness single-mode radiation. All-fiber construction and the robust monolithic design provide good stability and excellent beam quality thereby making fiber lasers a unique source for many industrial, military scientific and medical applications.
A typical cladding-pumped fiber comprises a single-mode (or a few mode) core doped with rare-earth ions and a plurality of cladding layers supporting multi-mode pumping light. The inner cladding surrounding the core is typically a silica cladding with a large cross section compared to that of the core. The outer cladding is typically a low-index polymer cladding, or fluorinated silica cladding, or air-silica structure with an effective refractive index less than that of the inner cladding providing a large numerical aperture and guiding properties for the inner cladding. Light from low brightness multimode optical sources such as single laser diodes or diode arrays can be coupled into the inner cladding due to its large cross sectional area and high numerical aperture. Propagating in the inner cladding pumping light is absorbed by the rare-earth ions in the core providing amplification for signals in the single-mode core. With an optical feedback provided by spectrally selective mirrors from both fiber ends (so called linear cavity) the cladding-pumped fiber becomes a laser oscillator at the selected wavelength. Absorption of the pump light in the core depends on the geometry of the fiber and is roughly proportional to the core area-to-inner cladding area ratio. The larger inner cladding area the smaller absorption coefficient at a fixed core area.
A variety of schemes have been suggested for coupling low brightness sources into the inner cladding efficiently. The most common among them are side coupling using a multimode fiber (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,673), etching pits into the double-clad fibers, coupling through a multimode fiber being in optical contact with a doped fiber with parallel surfaces, coupling through a tapered fiber bundle with/or without single mode fiber in the center of the bundle (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,864,644). All these techniques except the last one permit separation of the signal path of the single-mode core from the pump-launching path which is very important for fiber amplifiers. No technique has been suggested for de-coupling of the pump power from a cladding. The reason is that most of fiber lasers operate in a linear cavity design (Fabry-Perot cavity with two mirrors) and the length of the cavity is typically chosen to absorb more than 90% of the pump power. The length of fiber amplifiers is also optimized to reduce residual pump power to less than 10%. A linear cavity design works well up to laser powers of 100 W. However, with increased pump power handling the residual power becomes an issue.
A major difficulty preventing scaling fiber lasers to high output powers for example, hundreds of watts or kilowatt level, is an efficient coupling of a sufficient number of low brightness sources into the inner cladding. An increase in the cladding area results in a longer pump absorption length and a longer cavity length. In turn, a longer cavity length give rise to nonlinear effects such as Stimulated Raman scattering and stimulated Brillouin scattering that limit the output power of the system. The cavity length can be shorter if a pump-reflecting mirror is placed at the end of the cavity. However, residual pump light reflected from the output coupler in short fibers would likely damage the laser diode pump source.
An alternative to the pump-reflecting mirror is a ring cavity where pump light circulates in the cavity. However, for double-clad fibers there is no an appropriate fiber wavelength-division-multiplexer for constructing a ring cavity, as can be done with single-mode fibers. Use of bulk multiplexers requires polarization control, which is also difficult to achieve in double-clad fibers. The prior art solution for the ring cavity includes a 45° angle-polished fiber output end placed in front of the input end that can re-launch both the signal and pump power into the fiber. This scheme uses bulk elements and requires a number of fine interfaces with associated problems of matching and alignment. As a result, the demonstrated efficiency was lower than in the traditional linear cavity. Accordingly there is a need for a new robust and compact all-fiber design for a cavity with a re-circulating pump.
Another difficulty related to the typical linear cavity design of cladding-pumped fiber lasers is the problem of short wavelength generation in the fluorescence spectrum of fiber lasers. Typically, rare-earth ions in silica exhibit quite broad fluorescence spectrum. For example, fluorescence spectrum of Yb-doped fiber extends from 1020 nm to 1180 nm with a strong separate peak at 976 nm. However, it is very difficult to get efficient generation in the short wavelength part of the spectrum, and especially at 976 nm. The reason is that many rare-earth ions (for example, Tm, Yb, Er at 1535 nm, Nd at 900-940 nm) provide three-level lasing systems. In a three-level system, the lasing occurs from an excited level to either the heavily populated ground state or a closely spaced level separated from it by no more than a few kT. The significant thermal population of the lower lasing level results in re-absorption of light at the laser wavelength. The effect of re-absorption is much stronger at shorter wavelengths because of a smaller energy separation between the lower laser level and the ground state. For three-level or quasi-three-level systems the long cavity length will result in considerable re-absorption and therefore lead to a high threshold and a low efficiency. To reduce re-absorption, an intense pump power should be maintained in the fiber to keep the population inversion relatively high. However, it is difficult to fulfill this requirement for a linear cavity in the whole fiber without loss of conversion efficiency. Thus, a short ring cavity with a re-circulating pump would help to generate light at the short wavelength side of the broadband spectrum for three-level and quasi-three-level transitions.
The Y-doped fiber lasers generating at short wavelengths of their fluorescent spectrum in the range 976-1060 nm attract a lot of attention as a promising pump source for high-powered erbium-doped fiber lasers and amplifiers (1530-1630 nm) or as a pump for Pr-doped lasers and amplifiers (1310 nm region). Using a fiber Raman laser, light from the wavelength region of 980-1060 nm can be efficiently converted to the output wavelength from 1.1 to 1.7 micron. New industrial and military applications also require high power systems at wavelengths near 1 micron. High electrical-to-optical conversion efficiency is very important for many of those applications. Typical Yb-doped fiber lasers at 976-980 nm have a reduced cladding area to shorten the pump absorption length to less than a meter. However, reduction of a cladding diameter automatically results in a less coupled pump power from laser diodes. In the other approach, the core diameter can be increased along with a proportionally reduced a numerical aperture of the fiber. The maximum core diameter is limited by the requirement of single-mode propagation in the core and enhanced bending loss in low numerical aperture fibers. The latter approach along with a requirement to maintain a high pump power density along the fiber may provide an efficient way for high power generation in Yb fibers. The same considerations are valid for three-level transitions in fibers doped with Nd, Er, Tm and other ions. Clearly there is a need to find a more efficient method to generate a high optical power in rare-earth ion-doped fiber lasers at three-level and quasi-three-level transitions.